Coil / Nine Inch Nails — Recoiled
Naturally, the tracks bear similarities to the similarly 'leaked' Backwards demos - the never completed Coil album that Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor funded and planned to release on his Invisible label. Their inability to finish the album, originally due to follow up on the critical success of the glorious Love's Secret Domain LP, was said to be due to it feeling too generic, like much other electronic dance music of the time, and these remixes are arguably no different.
The opening track, Gave Up (Open My Eyes), is a remix from NIN's 1992 Broken EP. It also featured in the final episode of Peter Christopherson's notoriously banned NIN promo video, The Broken Movie, providing the soundtrack for his found footage-styled mock snuff movie of a suspended victim being cut, burnt and castrated before having his limbs amputated and finally his heart cut out and consumed by the torturer. While the crafted found footage style gives it a queasily unpleasant degree of realism, the results feel like an adolescently-willed 'gross out' without any depth beyond the initial shock of its surface. The music is, sadly, also shallow: metal guitars sneer repetitively over a frenetic, but slavishly regular drum machine, while Reznor's self-loathing lyrics are cut up and stretched. Apart from the way the voice is treated, the piece bears no hallmarks of creativity that are so usually abundant in Coil's output, travelling more towards the mainstream sound of bands such as Ministry, Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails themselves.
The rest of the tracks here are versions of remixes Coil did of pieces from NIN's 1994 album, The Downward Spiral. 'Closer (Unrecalled)' initially feels a bit closer to Coil with its creaky ratcheting sample interrupting a slower, stoned rhythm carrying sci-fi synth manoeuvres, and Reznor's voice once again twisted and distorted. But with more regular voice and guitar entering the mix it is still not enough to steer it away from staid, stadium territory. The remix of the album's title track starts with psychedelic, spacey backward manipulations before filters open and close rhythmically to create a sense of delirium-you-can-dance-to. It gets quite messy as the track progresses where treatments of different sounds are knitted roughly together to form a course patchwork of digital effects.
The second side of this release has two further versions of 'Eraser' to the three Coil originally provided for 1995's NIN remix album, Further Down The Spiral. The first, Eraser (Reduction) is much more like it - processed howls and hums that sound like Coil's Balance circle through a shredding, portentous air, its treated textures form a swirling cloud of feedback and sonic detritus. Treznor's voice is merely tacked on towards the end anecdotally. Finally, the last track, 'Eraser (Baby Alarm Remix)', the only track not to have been available on the aforementioned Uncoiled release, initially seems like more of the same until a drum machine and processed guitars get in the way of the brooding textures to create predictably chugging rock patterns.
While the attraction of a big studio is understandable, especially one that sports John Lennon's Mellotron, it always seemed a bit incongruous for Coil to collaborate with Nine Inch Nails who seemed to be co-opting industrial music tropes to make their otherwise middle-of-the-road rock seem like it had more depth. It also felt tacky that Reznor's studio was built in and promoted as the house where the Manson gang murdered Sharon Tate and friends in the late sixties. Such is the way of the world, Coil's mixes of Gave Up and Closer were licensed for use on film soundtracks (Young Americans and Se7en, respectively), probably making them among the most lucrative works of their entire career. Alas, sonically they don't live up to the rest of their supremely creative and seductive oeuvre and are recommended for completists only.